•Members spend one week each month at a plenary session in Strasbourg, when Parliament meets in full session. Additional two-day sittings are held in Brussels.
•With the assistance of its translators and interpreters, Parliament works in the eleven official languages of the Union: Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.
•The President oversees all the activities of Parliament and its constituent bodies. He or she presides over its plenary sittings and chairs the meetings of the Bureau and Conference of Presidents. He or she represents Parliament in all external relations, particularly international relations.
•The Bureau is the regulatory body responsible for Parliament's budget and for administrative, organisational and staff matters. In addition to the President and fourteen Vice-Presidents, it includes, in a consultative capacity, the five Quaestors, who are responsible for administrative matters relating directly to MEPs. The members of the Bureau are elected for two and a half years.
•The Committees
Parliament's standing committees, of which there are seventeen, do the preparatory work for Parliament's plenary sessions. Each committee appoints a chairman, three vice-chairmen and has a secretariat.
The committees draw up and adopt reports on legislative proposals and own-initiative reports. They also prepare opinions for other standing committees.In addition to these standing committees, Parliament can set up temporary committees and committees of inquiry.
•The Secretariat
Under the authority of a Secretary-General some 3,500 officials, recruited by competition from all the countries of the Union, work in the service of the European Parliament. The political groups have their own staff and Members their own assistants.
The European Parliament has to work within the constraints of multilingualism - which accounts for about one third of its staff - and the fact of having three places of work - Strasbourg, Brussels and Luxembourg. Running the European Parliament costs € 2.5 per year per EU inhabitant (the equivalent of 1.08% of the Union's total budget).
